Women's weeklies shaken up

Buffeted by change

IPC – the 'Ministry of Magazines' – had long seemed in control of the woman's weekly sector with Woman, Woman's Own and Woman's Weekly. Between them, these titles sold 3m copies a week in the 1980s (though this had halved since the mid-1960s). IPC's strategy was to undercut any newcomers on price and advertising rates, so forcing them out. However, two German groups with deep pockets – Bauer and Gruner + Jahr (part of Bertelsmann) – decided to take IPC on in 1985 with Bella and Best respectively. The result was a bloody nose for IPC, from which its traditional weeklies have never recovered. Instead, the market evolved, with Chat proving a big success for IPC.

• celebrity,
• classic: Best, Bella, Woman and Woman's Own. The oldest date back to the 1930s,
• mature and
• real life.

In 2004, IPC claimed to hold the top slot in the first three sectors with Now, Woman and Woman's Weekly and Chat second in the real-life stakes, though all were a long way behind Take a Break . That picture looked less rosy in mid-2006 with Emap's celebrity due Heat and Closer taking celebrity honours. IPC still holds on to the classic and mature sectors, but both are fast declining. Meanwhile, Emap is trying to build two new weekly categories:

• fashion/lifestyle/celebrity glossy with Grazia
• news/celebrity with First (May 2006 launch).

Sales table

Celebrity shake-up

Another publisher, Northern & Shell, had built up a publishing empire with the franchise for Penthouse and more downmarket men's titles such as Asian Babes . Attempts to 'go straight' failed until the launch of OK! in April 1993. This was at first a large format monthly competing with weekly Hello! A 16-page preview was distributed with the Sunday Express (one of papers N&S was to take over in 2000). The year 1993 also saw the short-lived spoof Guess Who! arrive.

OK! was taken weekly by ex-Woman's Own, TV Times and BBC/Redwood editor Richard Barber in March 1996. A couple of month's later, Gruner + Jahr entered the fray again with Here!, to be followed in October by Now from IPC. Australian actor Mel Gibson on the cover must have done the trick, because just seven months later Gruner + Jahr sold Here! to IPC, who folded it into Now.

Turning up the Heat

The two companies continued to joust, with Emap giving away Ooh! Scandal! as a spoiler for the launch of N&S's Star in 2003 and threatening legal action against any Heat copycats.

Other titles, particularly IPC's traditional weeklies, lost ground. The UK's largest publisher was treading creative water, having been brought out by managers in 1997 from Reed with money from venture capitalist Cinven. Its lack of innovation and the closure of titles in the next five years has been attributed to a focus on generating profits, in preparation for a sale to Time Warner in 2001.

Victims and price cuts

At Northern & Shell, Richard Desmond's strategy of buying access to top celebrities worked for OK! in overtaking Hello! . The latter stuck to its royalty-based guns but even Desmond's wallet was stretched and OK! increasingly began to have to make do with B and C-list names. This put it into competition with lower-priced competition, including Desmond's own launches. Both OK! and Hello! lost 100,000 sales.

By May 2004, celebrity magazines were in a price war. IPC's Now cut its cover price by 20p to £1 in a bid to maintain its position as the top-selling celebrity weekly, because Emap's Heat had cut the sales gap to 30,000 copies. As well as Now, Closer, New! and Star were all using price as a selling tool.

Women's weeklies go Nuts

Things didn't stopped there. The first 10 weeks of 2005 saw a launch frenzy. In February, Grazia, 'Britain's first weekly glossy', arrived from Emap. It was a confident first issue. The focus was on fashion, led by celebrity covers – Jennifer Aniston, Kate Moss, Nicole Kidman for the first three issues. A massive £16m launch saw 650,000 taster copies being given away a week before the launch. A fortnight later, OK! and Daily Express publisher Northern & Shell launched a cheap woman-focused TV listings title, Take 5 , though it did not last long. Within a week, German group Hubert Burda Media jumped in with Full House, a package of true life stories, celebrity, prizes and puzzles.

The switch to weeklies was as a response to the growing power of supermarkets. Monthlies achieve the bulk of their sales in the first two weeks and can languish on shelves for a fortnight. Increased frequency gives the supermarkets – which resist giving their precious shelf space to new magazines without dropping existing ones – a higher turnover. Supermarkets want high circulation and high frequency – turning magazines into 'fast moving consumer goods' in the marketing jargon – like tins of beans. So 2005 was shaping up as the year of the weekly, particularly for women.

Yet more titles

In April 2006, Burda, a German company that publishes real-life weekly Full House, bought Essential publishing. Among its titles, was women's fortnightly Real (which it had bought from Bauer, another German group, in 2004).

Come May, First, a weekly news magazine for women aged 34+, hit the newsstands. The success of Grazia emboldened Emap into trying to establish another new sector. Falling sales among its classic weeklies saw IPC pump money into relaunching Woman in the same month. It was relaunched to create a 'modern and exciting style, with a positive, warm and confident tone'.

As the season drew to a close, German publisher H Bauer came along with its 'topical and relevant' women's weekly In the Know. Comparisons were made with First, but the company stressed the originality of the celebrity-free package with its £10m backing. However, In the Know closed in May 2007, with the title never getting over a lacklustre start – and demonstrating the need for big launch budgets. Also, First struggled. Emap decided to give the title a make-over with a new editor for a September 2007 relaunch and try to achieve the sort of effect it had when it relaunched Heat.

So who's winning?

As for individual publishers, H Bauer is the main loser, its titles dropping 15% of their sales. This probably reflects their age, so there must have been a lot riding on In the Know. That the title failed – the third failure in a row – was a big problem for the German group, as sales of Take a Break ebb away. However, the break-up of Emap gave the German publisher its chance and in 2008, it became the UK's biggest magazine publisher by buying up Emap's consumer magazines – though its first move was to close New Woman and First. Also, Bauer had managed to improve sales of its TV listings weekly TV Choice to close on IPC's What's on TV – the UK's top-selling magazine. IPC has been working very hard to stay still but Pick Me Up has a least covered the losses among its once-commanding classic titles and Look appears a winner as a high-street version of Grazia.

• Bella
• Closer
• Grazia
• Heat
• More
• Take a Break
• That's Life

DC Thompson is paying for a lack of innovation, while Hello! has picked up after a weak period – but maintained an upmarket readership – and The Lady continues its genteel decline.